Understanding Social Media Certificate

The Understanding Social Media Certificate offers students a framework for critical engagement with social media platforms, their cultural and technological influences, and societal impacts. This certificate emphasizes critical thinking about the complex relationships among social media, culture, and society. Students will develop a range of skillsets to critically evaluate digital social media culture and content, interrogate platform economics, and understand algorithmic influences on digital culture. Furthermore, students will explore the relationship between media technologies and identity formation in digital contexts, develop nuanced perspectives on social movements and activism in networked environments, and position contemporary social media phenomena to broader historical and theoretical media contexts. Through interdisciplinary coursework spanning Media Studies and Digital Marketing, students will learn to situate social media within broader historical, cultural, and economic contexts. This certificate prepares students to develop critical toolsets on social media that will serve them across academic disciplines and professional contexts.